Film Freak Central

The Karate Kid (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jaden Smith, Jackie Chan, Taraji P. Henson, Wenwen Han
screenplay by Christopher Murphey
directed by Harald Zwart

by Walter Chaw So here's the thing: there's something really powerful about the archetype of a child losing his father and finding a mentor and, on the flipside, of a father losing a son and finding an apprentice. Easy to scoff, it's also the worn-through, threadbare foundation for stuff like the Dardennes' arthouse favourite The Son, Beat Takeshi's Kikujuro, and Pixar's Up--so why not another go-round with a remake of The Karate Kid? The only places it truly fails are in its deviations from formula: a little too much faithless razzle-dazzle here, a bit too much equivocal bullshit there, and a whole lot of nepotism as overmatched Jaden Smith (spawn of producers Will and Jada Pinkett) grimaces his way through a cipher of a character. It's high-concept fat that clogs the arteries of a lean, John G. Avildsen-sculpted framework, this inner-city-to-Forbidden-city crap that sees li'l Dre (Smith) jetting off to Beijing when mommy (Taraji P. Henson) gets a job at an auto plant. Should there be an undercurrent of irony here about moving from Detroit to Beijing to work on cars? Doesn't matter, as in the place of subtext, The Karate Kid quickly introduces a deeply uncomfortable love story between 12-year-old Dre and little Mei (Han Wenwen) that culminates in a stolen kiss and a sexy dance set to Lady Gaga that has blank Dre slacking his jaw in the very approximation of Forrest Gump finally fucking Jen-nay. Is there a racial element when bully Cheng (Wang Zhenwei) warns Dre to "stay away from all of us"? Doesn't matter, as in the place of all that stuff about internment camps that so beautifully complicated the 1984 flick is the drama of Mr. Han née Miyagi (Jackie Chan) losing control of his car on a dark and stormy night (because just as every chink knows kung fu, none of them can drive--Han totals a car in the film while it's parked in his living room), thus opening the door for a ragamuffin to come calling like some funked-up changeling.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) + Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (2009)

WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS
**/****
starring Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin, Frank Langella
screenplay by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff
directed by Oliver Stone

LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE
*½/****
screenplay by John Orloff and Emil Stern, based on the novel Guardians of Ga'Hoole by Kathryn Lasky
directed by Zack Snyder

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Oliver Stone has a penchant for writing himself into living history, and normally, it's quite fascinating. By making movies about historical events whose ramifications have not yet fully materialized, he engages in a battle of wits with the unfamiliar. He tries to understand what's unfolding at this very moment, constantly on the lookout for something resembling closure. From that perspective, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (hereafter Wall Street 2) suffers from Stone's familiarity with the subject. Having already made a movie about the chaos of the free market, he knows exactly what he wants to say from the outset. Our boy Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) spent the Clinton years behind bars, leaving his personal life in shambles. Beloved son Rudy has died of a drug overdose, and hitherto-unmentioned daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan) is--irony of ironies!--a lefty blogger who won't have anything to do with him. Enter her fiancé, Jake Moore (professional protégé Shia LaBeouf, who's convincing enough; and the character's name is More, get it?), an ambitious green-energy investor who wants to learn a few moves from a living legend. As fate would have it, the two men share a mutual enemy in Bretton James (Josh Brolin), the slimy businessman who sent Gekko to the slammer and spread a few market rumours that prompted Jake's mentor/father figure (Frank Langella) to commit suicide. Gekko sees the chance to rekindle his relationship with Winnie, while Jake wants to make a mint founded on revenge. Alliances are forged, tricks are played, trust is abused, and, above all, greed continues to rule the day. When the bottom falls out, you'd best be prepared for a lot of hand-wringing in the executive boardroom--but hell, you know there are more important things floating around here, right? Winnie announces her pregnancy on the very same day that the 2008 economy does its final nosedive. Where do you think Wall Street 2 is going to end up?

Forbidden Planet (1956) [50th Anniversary Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

FORBIDDEN PLANET
***/****
DVD - Image A- Sound B Extras B
BD - Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens
screenplay by Cyril Hume
directed by Fred McLeod Wilcox

THE INVISIBLE BOY (1957)
ZERO STARS/****
Image B- Sound C+
starring Richard Eyer, Philip Abbott, Diane Brewster, Harold J. Stone
screenplay by Cyril Hume, based on the story by Edmund Cooper
directed by Herman Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Outrageously influential and utterly unlike its contemporaries, Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet today suffers from prosaic pacing and long stretches where its groundbreaking special effects take centre-stage as the cast gapes in slack-jawed, dim-witted appreciation. I suppose it's not altogether antithetical to the themes of the picture, one that finds its heroes pontificating on their primitiveness in the face of an awesome (and extinct) alien culture--but this open love of its own coolness ultimately represents Forbidden Planet's broadest, most negative impact. The worst of our mainstream spectaculars, after all, are buried under reaction shots as the characters who should be the least mesmerized by their surroundings are impelled to be audience surrogates. What still works about Forbidden Planet is its high-mindedness: those moments where mad scientist Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) declares that the knowledge gleaned from the new technologies he discovers by reverse-engineering a cache of alien artifacts will be jealously rationed by him alone. The dangerous idea that one entity would take on the moral and intellectual superiority to judge who should and should not be allowed to educate themselves was germane here in the middle of the Cold War and remains applicable to our current state of foreign affairs, where just the threat of knowledge acts simultaneously as a spur to aggression and as a deterrent for invasion. Considered by many to be the best of the '50s science-fiction cycle, Forbidden Planet, at once Luddite and in love with the potential for technological expansion, is at least unique for its unabashed indulgence in its subtext--though mining subtext tends to have the obvious effect of leaving the subtext barren.

Warner Bros. Presents Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1980s - DVD

Image B- Sound B- Extras B-
Goldie Gold and Action Jack: "Night of the Crystal Skull"
Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos: "Deadly Dolphin"
The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley: "Tall, Dark & Hansom"
The Flintstone Kids: "The Bad News Brontos/Invasion of the Mommy Snatchers/Dreamchip's Cur Wash/Princess Wilma"
Mister T: "Mystery of the Golden Medallions"
Dragon's Lair: "The Tale of the Enchanted Gift"
Thundarr the Barbarian: "Secret of the Black Pearl"
Kwicky Koala Show: "Show #1 - Dry Run/Robinson Caruso/High Roller/The Claws Conspiracy/Hat Dance/Dirty's Debut"
The Biskitts: "As the Worm Turns/Trouble in the Tunnel"
Monchhichis: "Tickle Pickle"
Galtar and the Golden Lance: "Galtar and the Princess"

by Alex Jackson

"Portions of original film elements from certain programs contained within no longer survive in pristine condition. As a result, archival elements of varying quality have been carefully assembled to provide you with as close an approximation of the original program as possible." --Actual disclaimer on the "Warner Bros. Presents Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1980s" DVD collection

From the sound of that, you would think they discovered these episodes of "Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos" and "Monchhichis" in the basement of an Argentinean mental hospital. Certainly, "Warner Bros. Presents Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1980s" holds genuine appeal as a cultural artifact. I was born in 1981 but have vague memories of watching an episode of "The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley", which might have featured a clip from the 1933 Fay Wray horror film The Vampire Bat. I have a better but still hazy memory of putting a cartoon "Mister T" temporary tattoo on my mom's guitar case. If nothing else, this collection is irrefutable evidence that I didn't imagine these programs.

Despicable Me (2010)

*½/****
screenplay by Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul
directed by Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud

by Ian Pugh It only takes a cursory glance at its cast of characters and the people embodying them to see the kind of trendy thinking that sank Despicable Me. The movie presents us with the headmistress of an orphanage clearly modeled after Edie McClurg--but rather than hire McClurg herself to voice the role, they got the Kristen Wiig, who hits her one, monotonous note over and over again. The antagonist proper is a bespectacled, bowl-cut pervert in an orange jumpsuit--but rather than have Eddie Deezen play him in full-blown Mandark mode, they got Jason Segel to shout a couple of dick jokes to the rafters. Finally, in the centre ring is Steve Carell, performing with a bizarre accent lodged somewhere between Boris Badenov and Ivan Drago. While Carell does an admirable job for what he's given, he's a little too dry to be a successful voice actor--you can't help but think that someone like Billy West or Tom Kenny would have done something truly great with the role.

Alice in Wonderland (2010) - Blu-ray + DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Mia Wasikowska
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw A diary of missed opportunities but not the disaster it could have been, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland reminds a great deal of Walter Murch's Return to Oz in that both are closer in spirit to the respective dark of their inspirations while still falling tantalizingly shy of the beguiling murk of their headwaters. (In terms of adaptations, No Country for Old Men holds the gold standard for cinema that understands its source well enough to use it in its own sentence.) It'll be compared of course to the Disney animated classic that mistook Lewis Carroll's misanthropy-soaked surrealism for whimsy--a comparison Burton tries to sidestep by incorporating more elements (the Bandersnatch, the Jabberwocky, the Jub-Jub Bird, snickersnack) from the largely-ignored second book, Alice Through the Looking Glass, but one that'll hound a film featuring plucked-out eyeballs and a castle moat traversed by skipping across severed heads.

Shrek Forever After (2010)

*/****
screenplay by Josh Klausner & Darren Lemke
directed by Mike Mitchell

by Ian Pugh Because Shrek the Third tied things up pretty conclusively, what they're probably going to tell you is that Shrek Forever After (hereafter Shrek 4) is more of an epilogue than a sequel. What they won't tell you is that this "epilogue," co-written by the screenwriter of Date Night, is more of a toy than a feature film. But your money's just as green as it ever was. Now settled into a monotonous family life, Shrek (voice of Mike Myers) strikes a deal with Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn) for the chance to live one more day as a bachelor/terrifying ogre. Unfortunately, said deal transports Shrek into an alternate reality in which he never rescued Fiona (Cameron Diaz) from the dragon's lair, freeing Rumpelstiltskin to conquer the kingdom of Far Far Away. And despite much talk of being grateful for what you have, that's all there is to it, really. Sure, it's better than Shrek the Third, but lots of things are better than Shrek the Third--and even then, Shrek 4 is only an improvement in the sense that it isn't obsessed with scatological humour...and that it doesn't leave an especially terrible aftertaste. It doesn't leave the slightest impression at all, in fact. It's not merely a product, it wants you to see it as a product: It's a Wonderful Life as told by Mr. Potter. Oh, and it's in 3-D. I mean, of course it is.

The Karate Kid Collection - DVD|The Karate Kid I & II [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

THE KARATE KID (1984)
***½/****
DVD - Image C+ Sound C+ Extras A
BD - Image A- Sound B+ Extras A
starring Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, Elisabeth Shue, Martin Kove
screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen
directed by John G. Avildsen

THE KARATE KID PART II (1986)
**/****
DVD - Image B- Sound C+ Extras D
BD - Image B+ Sound A- Extras D
starring Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, Yuji Okumoto, Tamlyn Tomita
screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen
directed by John G. Avildsen

THE KARATE KID PART III (1989)
*/**** Image C Sound C+
starring Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, Robyn Lively, Thomas Ian Griffith
screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen
directed by John G. Avildsen

THE NEXT KARATE KID (1994)
½*/**** Image B+ Sound C+
starring Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, Hilary Swank, Michael Ironside, Constance Towers
screenplay by Mark Lee
directed by Christopher Cain

by Walter Chaw Movies from the magic hour of my moviegoing experience cover that brief period of time between my being able to go to the cinema unattended (dropped at the theatre with a quarter to call the folks afterwards) and my being able to decide that there are actually films I'd rather not see for any price. You never love movies as much or in the same way as you do during this tiny porthole, and when my family first got a VCR (we were the last ones on the block), I pirated Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, and The Karate Kid onto one tape that I watched until you could see through the ribbon. Each seminal films of the fabulist '80s in their own way, all three spawned multiple sequels--though, at least until Indiana Jones struggles back to the screen with a walker and oxygen tank, The Karate Kid holds the record with four instalments in total. (And one that launched the career of a two-time Oscar winner, to boot.) Credit a lot of things for that: Bill Conti's classic score; John G. Avildsen's intuitive direction; and Pat Morita's and Ralph Macchio's superlative performances. But credit most of all the enduring power of a familiar tale told with conviction and skill. Take the intimidating volume of formulaic exercises that fall by the wayside (including The Karate Kid's own sequels) as testament to the difficulty of capturing a tiger by its tail.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Max Records, Catherine Keener, Lauren Ambrose, Mark Ruffalo
screenplay by Spike Jonze & Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak
directed by Spike Jonze 

by Walter Chaw Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are is the product of an artist who may only be able to assimilate art and the creation of it through the filter of celluloid and the music that animates its flickers. More, there's the suggestion in its depth of emotion that this may be the only way Jonze knows to communicate at all, and so he tasks it to capture the breadth of human experience. If the "film brats" of the New American Cinema were the first reared on a diet of the French New Wave and critical theory, this new post-modernism to which Jonze belongs consists of artists reared on the entire panoply of popular culture...and maybe nothing else. What other explanation is there for the elasticity and strangeness of films by people like Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino? They create works that strive towards the ineffable, seemingly unaware of film's limitations and therefore undaunted by ideas of what's possible.

Toy Story (1995) [Special Edition] + Toy Story 2 (1999) [Special Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD

TOY STORY
**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
screenplay by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow
directed by John Lasseter

TOY STORY 2
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Rita Hsiao, Doug Chamberlin & Chris Webb
directed by John Lasseter

TOY STORY 2

by Walter Chaw What time and memory seem to obscure about Pixar's Toy Story is that it is, for the most part, shrill and unpleasant, though it's easier to identify now that Pixar's technical facility is familiar. The picture's thick with bad behaviour, with everybody's favourite vintage cowboy doll Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) acting the spoiled, wounded, ultimately dangerous brat, jilted by his owner for a newer model, Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and determined to murder his rival until some moral compass asserts itself and Woody, grudgingly, comes to Jesus with his inevitable obsolescence. Toy Story plays a weird game with the idea of mortality in that its heroes are toys and, as such, doomed to a kind of infernal immortal half-life during which they can be tortured any number of ways--de-limbed, decapitated and reconstituted, melted, waterboarded we presume--in the name of a child's development. A memorable moment places our frenemies in a "bad" kid's bedroom where all the toys have been mutilated (our tiny Dr. Frankenstein provides the tension of the film's third act)--the message of the encounter retreating into that old kid's-flick saw that you can't judge a book by its cover.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)

*/****
starring Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Sean Bean
screenplay by Craig Titley, based on the novel by Rick Riordan
directed by Chris Columbus

by Walter Chaw You don't have to have read Ovid to enjoy Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (hereafter The Lightning Thief), because, hell, no one involved in the production appears to have read him. In fact, having a cursory knowledge of Greek mythology will mostly serve to irritate you, as the picture runs roughshod over a whole other religion whilst merging many of its images with Christian myth in an attempt to somehow justify itself to an imaginary audience of affronted, I don't know, Protestants? What other reason could there be to bastardize the Greek conception of the underworld by mixing it with Milton's? Actually, in conception, the movie's Hades (Steve Coogan) owes a lot more to Peter Jackson's Balrog than to Blake's illuminations, and suddenly director Chris Columbus's motivations come into sharper focus. Not having any familiarity with Rick Riordan's popular tween novels, the first of which is adapted for this film, I can only comment that I also didn't appreciate a Stepin Fetchit character, Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), who fulfills a threefer function as talking animal/pet (he's a satyr), token black guy comic relief, and uncomfortable throwback to the bad old days of sideshow coon. No better way to inject levity than to have a hilarious black guy crack wise, widen his eyes, and declare his everlasting fealty to massah. Maybe he exists under the same rationale as Jar Jar Binks and the Na'vi: that fictional creatures can't be racist caricatures and, besides, this venomous stereotyping is in a children's film, so we should all just relax. Regardless, The Lightning Thief could play on a double bill with The Blind Side for a cozy trip back to the '30s in American cinema.

Shorts (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jon Cryer, William H. Macy, Leslie Mann, James Spader
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw George Bernard Shaw posited that one should "make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself." Transposed to film, it seems more often than not that when one refers to a "kid's movie," it means that it's a piece of shit no one in their right mind would watch, so: give it to your little ones. Go farther with it and find that said pieces of shit are also above critique for most, defended with the unassailable notion that if their toddlers enjoyed it, then what's the harm? Except that the reason children aren't allowed to make decisions for themselves is because they'd choose to watch stuff like Shorts, Robert Rodriguez joints rolled exclusively for the molly-coddling of his children, who come up with this shit for their rebel-with-a-crew daddy to crank out of his make-hole.

Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Miley Cyrus, Emily Osment, Jason Earles, Billy Ray Cyrus
screenplay by Dan Berendsen
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Bill Chambers Peter Chelsom may have sold his soul when he joined the ranks of Lasse Hallstrom and John Madden to become a house director for Miramax, but going to work at Disney--on a feature-film vehicle for one of the company's biggest brands, no less--is a mercenary move, pure and simple. So it's surprising, considering he probably could've treated the job as a paid vacation without incurring the wrath of "Hannah Montana" fans (who've been weaned on a particularly low-rent sitcom), to say nothing of the suits in charge (Disney favours foremen to filmmakers, after all), that Chelsom seems legitimately inspired by the material more often than not. The 'Hannah Montana' concept itself needs only gentle pushes to yield something resembling a story, but Chelsom doesn't exactly coast on it; anyone who's involuntarily endured the collected works of Kenny Ortega or Andy Fickman will notice a more idiosyncratic hand at the helm almost immediately. While I can't say I've ever thought much of Chelsom's films (they're a bit twinkly for my tastes), he appears to have found his niche. As a work of Hollywood imperialism goes, it's certainly preferable to his remake of Shall We Dance?.

The Princess and the Frog (2009)

*½/****
screenplay by Ron Clements & John Musker & Rob Edwards
directed by Ron Clements & John Musker

by Ian Pugh Disney has resurrected its traditional (i.e., 2-D) animation department only to plunder plots and themes from its own vault, but because we're all familiar with what Disney represents in this day and age, we're meant to accept it with a wink and a nod. This is the same old Cinderella trope located firmly within the "Family Guy" generation, the film's hip acknowledgment of genre conventions (the absurdity of talking animals, the modern irrelevance of royalty) nevertheless failing to capitalize on that newfound consciousness in any meaningful way. So while it offers the reasonable assertion that the importance of love and family shouldn't be lost in the pursuit of a dream, it still ends with a message of no-happiness-without-marriage straight outta the 16^th century. And whatever PR folderol you've read about The Princess and the Frog representing the company's "first black princess," be aware that Bold Leaps Forward are hardly the priority here, the common but wholly-valid criticism being that the characters spend more screentime as frogs than as people.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw It's easily worse than Mike Newell's go at The Goblet of Fire, and it's satisfying to note that it fails for many of the same reasons. For all the gorgeously-decayed gothic architecture, the German Expressionism, the bleached colour palette, etc., Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (hereafter Harry Potter 6) isn't the moody requiem before the bloody mass of parts 7 and 7a in the next couple of years, but instead this ungainly tween romcom with a sudden horde of amphibious zombies (not unlike the aquatic sequence in Harry Potter 4), inexplicable cameos from Ursa, Non, and Zod, and silly broomstick rugby. Dark undercurrents? No question. But they're allowed to wither as the film focuses its attention on three non-professional actors doing their best to transform ridiculous, sweet-sixteen romantic imbroglios into Chekhov and Shakespeare, with the combined might of what seems the entire pantheon of great modern British movie actors milling around behind them. The problem isn't that the film is character driven; the problem is that the characters' problems are insipid. Gone is the intense, sticky, stunningly emotional father issues tackled by Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban--the first real hint that this series could become the grown-up artifact the books never quite will given their much-publicized "meh" denouement. Gone is the continuation of that unsolvable Oedipal complexity that arose when the father figures were revealed as less than godlike in Yates's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the best film of the series by a nose--and one of the best American films of that year). In their place is a lot of insufferable slapstick carried off by actors no one would assume capable of screwball in environments better suited to Hammer. horrors: it's "Abbott & Costello Meet the Dementors."

Miracle on 34th Street (1947) - DVD

***/**** Image F (colorized)/B+ (b&w) Sound B Extras C
starring Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn, Gene Lockhart
screenplay by George Seaton, based on the story by Valentine Davies
directed by George Seaton

by Alex Jackson George Seaton's Miracle on 34^th Street isn't my Christmas movie of choice. My most potent movie memory of Christmas is actually watching the Star Wars trilogy when it was broadcast on the USA network however many years ago. Accordingly, I make it a point of marking the holiday by watching some kind of Star Wars-like "deep reality" science-fiction or fantasy film, such as The Lord of the Rings, or Blade Runner. A couple years back, I watched The Passion of the Christ. But I digress. Of all the major Christmas movie cults--including those surrounding A Christmas Story, It's a Wonderful Life, Elf, and 1951's A Christmas Carol--the Miracle on 34^th Street cult is the one with which I'd most want to spend the holidays. The film manages to be irreverent without becoming sacrilegious and sentimental without becoming saccharine. It's a pretty silly film, but I guess you could say that it's serious about being silly. It values silliness for its restorative, therapeutic quality.

The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans (2009); Planet 51 (2009); Me and Orson Welles (2009)

THE BAD LIEUTENANT - PORT OF CALL: NEW ORLEANS
****/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner
screenplay by William Finkelstein, based on the film by Abel Ferrara
directed by Werner Herzog

PLANET 51
*/****
screenplay by Joe Stillman
directed by Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad & Marcos Martinez

ME AND ORSON WELLES
**/****
starring Claire Danes, Zac Efron, Christian McKay, Zoë Kazan
screenplay by Holly Gent Palmo & Vincent Palmo, based on the book by Robert Kaplow
directed by Richard Linklater

by Ian Pugh Playing against his sadistic instincts, police sergeant Terrence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) saves a man from drowning in a flooded prison during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, earning him not only a promotion to lieutenant but also a debilitating spinal injury. A subsequent addiction to prescription painkillers inevitably leads McDonagh to harder drugs and casual abuses of his newfound power as he attempts to solve the murder of a Senegalese drug dealer and his family. Trading Abel Ferrara's sulphuric New York for a no-less-hellish Louisiana noir, Werner Herzog's in-name-only remake of Bad Lieutenant is a work of delirious madness. That should come as no surprise from the man who's spent the last forty years cataloguing human obsession, but I don't think I'd ever really understood the method behind it until The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans (hereafter Bad Lieutenant 2). Madness is about possibility, and what better complement to that philosophy than Nicolas Cage, an actor who--at his best, like Herzog--apparently regards the conventions and boundaries of his craft as simple suggestions that must be defied? A quick look at what they're capable of accomplishing together and you're a little surprised they haven't teamed up before. As McDonagh, Cage projects the dangerous unpredictability of Kinski^* and the sympathetic brutality of Bruno S.: you don't fear him, exactly, but you're afraid of what he might become; you don't feel sorry for him, but you lament what he could have been. ("I'll kill 'im," he says at one point, the frightening indifference in his voice leaving uncertain if--or how--he plans to act on that idle threat.) Halfway through the film, after the stakes in play are thoroughly established, Cage/McDonagh suddenly adopts a muted, cotton-mouthed accent. Why?

Up (2009) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras N/A
screenplay by Bob Peterson
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw There's still something breathless about Up, but I wonder if the Pixar formula isn't starting to show its seams now in its second decade of producing masterpieces--if there's a lack of freshness here in its familiarly exhilarated, cozily excited spaces. None of that fatigue is in evidence in the film's miraculous, wordless prologue, however: destined to compete with the opening-credits sequence of Watchmen as the single best stretch in any film this year, it establishes character, motivation, story of place, and sense of time without leaving a dry eye in the house. Shame the picture also peaks in these first ten minutes. It reminds of the wordless bit describing Jessie's abandonment in Toy Story 2, or the entire first half of WALL·E, and it suggests that Pixar is unparalleled in exploiting the possibilities for visual storytelling in its cavernous digital medium. The comparison of WALL·E to Chaplin is on point: When Pixar trusts the expressiveness of its mainframe and the beautiful, liquid clarity of its animation techniques, I don't know that there's ever been a better "silent" filmmaking collective. In their roster, it's arguable that they've only really faltered twice: once with the tedious Seven Samurai redux A Bug's Life, and again with the noxious redneck-baiting Cars. And while Up is nowhere near that bottom, it finds itself somewhere in the middle thanks to the peculiar ceiling to its invention (an entire Lost World and all you got is a giant bird and a talking dog?) and sentimentality that edges from sweet to mawkish. There are one too many cutaways to a dead wife's portrait and one too many winsome sighs as a plan made in childhood looms tantalizingly near.

2009 TIFF Bytes #3.5: A Shine of Rainbows

originally published September 23, 2009
Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

A SHINE OF RAINBOWS (dir. Vic Sarin)
Gawd, this movie is so nauseatingly nice. And generic. And hackneyed--any seasoned moviegoer will be able to predict every single story beat in advance. Connie Nielsen and Aidan Quinn--neither of whom is from Ireland (the director, meanwhile? From India)--play an Irish couple who adopt an adorable stuttering moppet (John Bell) from the local Dickensian orphanage. Because the kid is timid, kind of effeminate, and more than happy to learn the ropes from Nielsen, stoic, grunty Quinn can't relate to him. But then tragedy strikes (as you know it will from the first moment Nielsen tentatively clutches at her chest), and Quinn goes on a bender, and the kid steals a boat, and Quinn's grinch heart grows three sizes when the kid inevitably capsizes. Did I mention the baby seal yet? Who is this movie for? ½*/4

There may still be another capsule at the mothersite, but otherwise this it for my TIFF coverage. Apologies that I wound up reviewing such underwhelming fare; I confess I didn't pursue the buzz very aggressively--a muscle injury, coupled with the unexpected death of a friend, left me at the start of the Festival with little physical or psychic stamina. I'm kinda bummed that in the case of both Werner Herzog movies I showed up at the wrong theatre, but on that I blame a seemingly genetic aversion to doublechecking. Thanks for reading, even if you haven't felt much like commenting!

The Dark Crystal (1982) [Superbit] + [25th Anniversary Edition] - DVDs|Blu-ray Disc

***/****
Superbit DVD - Image B Sound C+
Anniversary DVD - Image A Sound B+ Extras A
BD - Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
screenplay by David Odell
directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz

by Bill Chambers When Jim Henson passed away in 1990, he left behind a diverse legion of fans and a company whose ultimate success, it now seems, hinged on his input. Jim Henson Productions and The Creature Shop are still thriving financially, but as the past few Muppet films (or that silly-looking computer-generated monkey from Lost In Space) demonstrate, the thrill and genius are gone. I'm positive that The Dark Crystal made today by Henson's successors would not provoke from an audience of kids five to fifty the same spellbound response the 1982 original does. Which is not to say there isn't room for improvement.

TIFF '09: The Hole

**/****
starring Chris Massoglia, Haley Bennett, Nathan Gamble, Teri Polo
screenplay by Mark L. Smith
directed by Joe Dante

by Bill Chambers At the outset, it worried me that The Hole (no relation to any of the films bearing that title in the past), the great Joe Dante's return to the big screen, has little to no marquee value. Silly, I know: It's not like Gremlins' Zach Galligan was or is a household name--and besides, this is one of Dante's kid-oriented pictures, which are never star-driven. Still, to go from "and Steve Martin" to "and Teri Polo" in six short years is pretty humbling; Dante long ago paid his dues in B-movies and, however happy he might be to get away from studio interference/oppression, I'm sad to see him back there--not just because he hardly deserves such a Wellesian fate, but also because he's a director whose imagination grew in proportion to his funding, and he seems no longer inspired but instead stupefied by a shoestring budget. At least where his feature work is concerned.

CJ7 (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Stephen Chow, Xu Jiao, Huang Lei, Kitty Zhang
screenplay by Vincent Kok, Tsang Kan Cheong, Sandy Shaw Lai King, Fung Chih Chiang, Lam Fung
directed by Stephen Chow

by Bryant Frazer Lord knows we need inspired lunatics like Stephen Chow. Chow is a genial, graceful physical comic in the mode of Jackie Chan, yet even sillier, if you can imagine that. Like Chan, he makes movies that feel conspicuously alien in a Hollywood context, in large part because he's expert in a discipline that Hollywood has lately devalued. In the U.S., the dominant style of comedy is verbally oriented, with quips, awkward characters, and contrived situations driving the gags. For Stephen Chow, comedy is largely body-oriented. It's not that he doesn't script situation comedy--a movie like God of Cookery, with its parody of celebrity-chef competitions (and John Woo movies!), is built on an elaborate sitcom frame--but that he's more obsessed with performance. Chow is preoccupied with people's faces, their body types, the way they approach one another, and how they stand in conversation or confrontation. By the time he did Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, it was easy to see how he found the newly-affordable field of digital VFX work to be an avenue for extending the reach of a physical gag, using digital doubles to subject characters to the kind of strain and abuse that wouldn't fly with real actors.

Sunshine Cleaning (2009); The Last House on the Left (2009); Race to Witch Mountain (2009)|Race to Witch Mountain - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

SUNSHINE CLEANING
**½/****
starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin, Jason Spevack
screenplay by Megan Holley
directed by Christine Jeffs

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT
**½/****
starring Garret Dillahunt, Sara Paxton, Monica Potter, Tony Goldwyn
screenplay by Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth, based on the motion picture written and directed by Wes Craven
directed by Dennis Iliadis

RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dwayne Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, Carla Gugino, Ciarán Hinds
screenplay by Matt Lopez and Mark Bomback, based on the book Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key
directed by Andy Fickman

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Norah (Emily Blunt) is a sort of overripe Juno MacGuff: older but no wiser, quick-witted but shiftless. As she sticks her hand underneath a railroad track, pulling it out just before a train passes, the question is clear: why is she here, doing something so unbelievably stupid, when she should be out trying to get a life? Turns out this game of chicken reminds her of the day she and her sister Rose (Amy Adams) discovered that their mother committed suicide. Christine Jeffs's Sunshine Cleaning feels like a response to a recent spate of smarmy little indie films in the sense that it bothers to explore the self-aware idiosyncrasies typically taken for granted, and it comes to the startling conclusion that perhaps these "personality quirks" aren't the building blocks of individualism, but rather signposts for unresolved trauma and budding mental illness. (Given how contradictory this film is to the Little Miss Sunshine mentality (and Alan Arkin's presence makes the comparison inevitable), can we assume that its title is a double entendre?) You may laugh when Rose's son Oscar (Jason Spevack) is kicked out of school for licking his teacher's leg, or when her father Joe (Arkin) hustles unsuspecting business owners with one get-rich-quick scheme after another, yet the lingering question is whether or not they'd engage in "funny" behaviour if not for their inherited anguish. "It's tough raising a kid by yourself, huh?" Joe tells Rose after she asks him to babysit at an inconvenient time. "Try two." The attempt to mine humour from these tragic aftermaths doesn't make Sunshine Cleaning a morbid film, exactly--but it definitely makes for a haunted one.

G-Force (2009)

**/****
starring Bill Nighy, Will Arnett, Zach Galifianakis, Kelli Garner
screenplay by The Wibberleys and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio and Tim Firth
directed by Hoyt Yeatman

by Ian Pugh It's no small wonder, I suppose, that Disney's 3-D contraption G-Force isn't nearly as bad as it could--and by all rights should--be. Certainly, there are people at the Mouse House still convinced that an overload of genre clichés (here the conventions of the spy movie) are made instantly clever when applied to talking, farting animals (here guinea pigs), and that the company's morality factory hasn't already exhausted the virtues of makeshift families and believing in yourself. But encoded in the formula this time around is an odd, unspoken thesis about facing the hitherto-ignored consequences of cruelty towards those who can't defend themselves. Most intriguing to that end, the big-name actors roped into lending their voices to this mess are appropriately cast, their live-action personae transferred to a sticky CGI concoction of animal nature and human spite. Steve Buscemi cuts loose as an insane, sadistic hamster (his paranoid tendencies--he jealously guards his territory while mumbling to himself--born of "the psych ward at UCLA"), for instance, while Nicolas Cage, as an orphaned, star-nosed mole named "Speckles," improbably gives his best performance in years. Utilizing his weirdo inflections from Peggy Sue Got Married, Cage manages to channel his familiar space-case into an unlikely outlet and pump it with quiet desperation--dare I say pathos--without even the smallest hint of the self-parody that's plagued him of late. More than what the film deserves? Most definitely, although the high points of G-Force suggest that, at some stage of production, in some alternate universe, it may have actually deserved it.

Chick Flick Politick - DVDs + Blu-ray Disc

BRIDE WARS (2009)
ZERO STARS/**** Image N/A Sound C Extras F
starring Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, Kristen Johnston, Candice Bergen
screenplay by Greg DePaul and Casey Wilson & June Diane Raphael
directed by Gary Winick

CATCH AND RELEASE (2007)
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jennifer Garner, Timothy Olyphant, Kevin Smith, Juliette Lewis
written and directed by Susannah Grant

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS (2008)
[JACKPOT EDITION]
***/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras B+
starring Cameron Diaz, Ashton Kutcher, Rob Corddry, Dennis Miller
screenplay by Dana Fox
directed by Tom Vaughan

27 DRESSES (2008)
[WIDESCREEN EDITION]
**/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras B+
starring Katherine Heigl, James Marsden, Malin Akerman, Edward Burns
screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna
directed by Anne Fletcher

ENCHANTED (2007)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Susan Sarandon
screenplay by Bill Kelly
directed by Kevin Lima

by Walter Chaw I'm not kidding: Bride Wars is reptilian, hateful stuff, biologically engineered to disrespect--with maximum efficiency--the precise demographic to which it targets itself. It's like an antibody to the middle-class, medium-attractive girl by virtue of encouraging her to associate herself with upper-middle-class, gorgeous avatars and, through that agency, act in ways completely hostile towards common sense and decency. It's an epidemic of bad taste: there's no other way to read the suggestion that size-zero Kate Hudson is a fat, disgusting swine for gaining five pounds pounding chocolate and cookies for a couple of weeks, is there? What's harder to explain is a scene in the middle where rivals/best friends Liv (Hudson) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) do a slutty dance-off in a strip-club for the crown of "sexiest bride." Here's the weird part: one of them actually cares when the other one wins. In the middle of a movie that can only hope to attract women as its audience, here's a scenario that physically exploits women as opposed to just emotionally or situationally (as is more to be expected). It's like a soul-kiss and a reach-around between Vin Diesel and Paul Walker to cap off a nice street race. But does it have the same chilling effect on its would-be audience, or does it instead feed into the electric lesbian tension that serves as motor for all these "Sex and the City" knock-offs? Never mind, it's not important. What is somewhat important is that Gary Winick, the heir-apparent to Garry Marshall's chick-flick throne, be discouraged from ever directing another movie.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009)

*/****
screenplay by Michael Berg, Peter Ackerman, Yoni Brenner
directed by Carlos Saldanha

by Walter Chaw It's not entirely accurate to say that I've hated the Ice Age movies. They're not, after all, the Land Before Time series, the post-classic Disney output just prior to the Pixar revolution, or, heaven forefend, the Shrek trilogy. No, better to say that the Ice Age franchise is at worst merely the quintessence of inconsequence: they're films so bereft of wit and vigour that their biggest crime isn't the constant shit and hit routines, nor the predictable parade of unearned sentimentality, but rather that they're as inert as the right side of the Periodic Table. The message in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (hereafter Ice Age 3)--that no matter what our heroes look like on the outside (two mammoths, two opossums, a giant sloth, a sabre-toothed tiger), on the inside, they're members of one tribe--is the same as in the first two instalments, and by this time, its constant mantric recitation begins to take on the air of unaware self-parody. Of course, despite its incessant championing of a non-traditional family unit, like Shrek, it still has a mammoth (Manny (voiced by Ray Romano)) marry a mammoth (Ellie (Queen Latifah)), leaving cross-species miscegenation, unlike the otherwise execrable Madagascar sequel, to the actors voicing them. What I wouldn't give for the same premise in live-action with Romano married to Latifah, the latter morbidly knocked-up and royally pissed-off.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: Hachiko: A Dog's Story

Hachi: A Dog's Tale
ZERO STARS/****
starring Richard Gere, Joan Allen, Sarah Roemer, Jason Alexander
screenplay by Stephen P. Lindsey
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Jefferson Robbins SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's better than Marley & Me, but so's a Tasering. At least the title alerts you up front to the presence of a dog in this Lasse Hallström movie--the latest Japanaptation, after Shall We Dance, to star serial sentimentalist Richard Gere. As a lifelong mutt owner, I'm unimpressed by stories of fierce canine loyalty and homing instinct. The dog hears your train coming and runs to meet you? That's because he knows you're gonna feed him, you ass. The dog that persists for a whole decade after you're dead, however, could be called obsessive and stupid, not loving and noble. But because it's a G-rated movie based on a Japanese film (Hachiko Monogatari) that was in turn "based on a true story," producer/star Gere demands that your throat tighten. (This even as Hallström shoots Hachiko's POV in an alienating low-angle Cujovision.) Our famous Buddhist reluctantly adopts a lost Akita pup at his commuter railway station, unaware that this particular hound was whelped and shipped direct from a Nippon monastery, fated to shadow him through his earthly turn on the karmic wheel and beyond. That's the judgment of Gere's wise Japanese co-worker (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), who doubles as his kanji interpreter and kendo partner. (Offscreen, he no doubt instructs his friend in the tea ceremony, shiatsu, and how to make those cool ninja smoke bombs.) The dog must be magic: it arrives in Gere's Northeastern hamlet of "Bedridge" (you're shitting me) while the Christmas lights are hanging, just in time for the 1996 World Series. This film does for continuity what my dogs do for my lawn, it doesn't care enough about its supporting characters to name them aloud, and it even misidentifies Hachiko's breed. Gere's music professor composes the kind of faux-Vivaldi piano twinkles (courtesy Jan A.P. Kaczmarek) that grace the soundtracks of...well, of Lasse Hallström films; his work is so crucial that he ignores loyal Hachi's warning to stay home on the day he's bound to die. Not that it would've helped--if he can't be saved upon collapsing in a crowded university lecture hall, what are the odds he'd ride out a stroke reading NEWSWEEK on his own crapper? Too bad Hachi's owner showed so little concern in kind, letting him wander for years, leashless and untagged, through the town's busiest streets. Hachiko is the perfect illustration of George Lucas's alleged rule of cinematic emotionalism: if you want your audience to cry, kill a cute animal. It's instructive, in light of Hachiko, to revisit Hallström's 1985 breakthrough My Life As A Dog. In each, a grown man engages in barking to get into his wife's knickers. Also? Both films suck, and Hallström hasn't improved one lick since the first dog he murdered to make us cry.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009) - Blu-ray Disc + Bedtime Stories (2008) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

PAUL BLART: MALL COP
*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring Kevin James, Jayma Mays, Keir O'Donnell, Shirley Knight
screenplay by Kevin James & Nick Bakay
directed by Steve Carr

BEDTIME STORIES
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Adam Sandler, Keri Russell, Guy Pearce, Russell Brand
screenplay by Matt Lopez and Tim Herlihy
directed by Adam Shankman

by Ian Pugh For Kevin James and his co-writer, the talking cat from "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", it's not enough that Paul Blart (James) is a fat moron prone to knocking things over with the sheer force of his girth--he must also be completely oblivious, fully convinced that he possesses more power and responsibilities as a mall cop than any reasonable person would believe. So what to do when Paul's newest trainee (Keir O'Donnell) turns out to be a Hans Gruber wannabe who takes over the mall with his hip young gang in a bid to clean it out? A feature-length parody of Die Hard has long stopped being an enticing prospect, given that Die Hard itself has been deconstructed to death by the fact of its enormous influence on the action genre (to the degree that the "Die Hard in an X" template actually became the dominant model for action movies in the 1990s), with the proverbial final nail driven in by a third sequel, Live Free or Die Hard, that concluded there was no point in still pretending our everyman hero was anything but invincible. As Paul Blart: Mall Cop sees it, the only way to endue the John McClane archetype with any tension is to make him fat and stupid. The first time we see Paul, he's shovelling food into his mouth, his sweater stained with perspiration from beneath his man-boobs, shortly before his hypoglycaemia kicks in and sidelines him from joining the police academy. But he's got a big heart or something, and that's what counts, right?

A Bug's Life (1998) - [2-Disc Collector's Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disc

**/****
DVD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
BD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Donald McEnery & Bob Shaw
directed by John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton

by Walter Chaw The Seven Samurai by way of ¡Three Amigos!, Pixar's A Bug's Life stands as the company's sole artistic disappointment, suffering from a weightlessness that is particularly troubling given that it is also the only Pixar production whose characters don't interact with the human world. The revelation embedded in its relative failure is that the animation studio is better at satire than it is at fantasy--not a terrible thing, for sure (after all, anime legend Hayao Miyazaki has never made a film independent of the human realm), the picture still points to the damning difficulty of creating a fantasy unto itself and based on alien quirk that is more than an exercise in Flintstones-era visual punning wrapped around a familiar underdog-uplift narrative.

Monsters Vs Aliens (2009)

*½/****
screenplay by Maya Forbes & Wallace Wolodarsky and Rob Letterman and Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger
directed by Rob Letterman & Conrad Vernon

by Walter Chaw As a joke, a pal and I once described the ideal movie as an epic, feature-length battle between robots and dinosaurs. DreamWorks, as a kind of joke, too, I think, have now released the animated Monsters Vs Aliens in a vaunted 3-D technique that enhanced a few scenes in Coraline last month but feels more the gimmicky affectation here. It feels, in fact, like the entire reason behind making a film that's content to trot out those old kid-flick stand-bys of accepting differences and learning to love who you are as the entire backbone for grand, city-destroying slapstick. The most interesting thing about it might be that a sequence buried in the middle of the closing credits posits a world-ending nuclear holocaust initiated in a war room set borrowed directly from Dr. Strangelove. It's a weird thing to have in a children's movie (odd, too, appearing so soon after Alex Proyas's own apocalyptic Knowing), and the zeitgeist sweepstakes are up and running in 2009 with the possibility that we're at the end of days infecting even this most optimistic, empty, popular of films. The rest is your run-of-the-mill kid's flick: noisy, senseless, and, save a couple of moments where Seth Rogen's voice made me giggle, not terribly entertaining. It has an ugly bad guy, Gallaxhar (voiced by Rainn Wilson), who clones himself, setting up the tension between individuation and the politics of mass hysteria, the unsubtle suggestion being that while good guys Bob (Rogan) and Link (Will Arnett) are stupid, they're not anywhere near as stupid as the enemy.

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008) - DVD + Beverly Hills Chihuahua (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE
**/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+
starring Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Danny Huston, Jeff Bridges
screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on the book by Toby Young
directed by Robert Weide

BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA
½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Piper Perabo, Manolo Cardona, Jamie Lee Curtis, José María Yazpik
screenplay by Analisa LaBianco and Jeffrey Bushell
directed by Raja Gosnell

by Ian Pugh Tipping its hat to Godard through a poster on the wall of disillusioned magazine editor Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (hereafter How to Lose Friends) owes an enormous debt to the success of The Devil Wears Prada, but it may be more accurate to describe it as Contempt as told by Elizabethtown-era Cameron Crowe. Which is to say, it argues that the only way to beat the entertainment industry at its game of media-manipulation is to play by the rules. The idealistic writer has to sell out, temporarily at least; and when he loses the girl to some asshole "in the know," the audience can rest assured that they'll be reunited soon enough. Simon Pegg ostensibly plays boorish journo Sidney Young, a British transplant in New York City come to shake the foundations of a thinly-veiled VANITY FAIR clone only to endure several rude awakenings. Pegg really plays the part of the wacky Kirsten Dunst pixie from Elizabethtown, though, come from merry old England with a fistful of snark to teach strait-laced Kirsten Dunst (here essaying the Orlando Bloom role) about the fruitlessness of obsessing over ridiculous establishments beyond your control. Well, that and the joys of Con Air.

Meet Dave (2008) - DVD

*½/**** Image N/A Sound B- Extras F
starring Eddie Murphy, Elizabeth Banks, Gabrielle Union, Scott Caan
screenplay by Rob Greenberg & Bill Corbett
directed by Brian Robbins

by Walter Chaw I'm eternally grateful to the infernal chemistry alchemized betwixt Mephistophlean Eddie Murphy and chowderhead Faust Brian Robbins for sparking the second-funniest headline in THE ONION's gallery of classic one-liners: "Eddie Murphy fucks self for $20M." (The funniest, for the record, is Gene Siskel's obit headline: "Ebert Victorious.") Who knew that Robbins' extraordinary inability to contribute anything of value to anything he's ever turned his baleful attention towards would be the mendacity needed to allow a couple of the gags in the latest Mur-Bins collaboration Meet Dave to work to whatever extent they do? Also helping is that the rampant misogyny and racism that marked their previous film together, Norbit, is toned down to a family-friendly sizzle this time around. Of course black people dance to hip hop and love processed meat stuffs; of course women like to cry and hold hands; and of course gay men come out not long after witnessing their first Broadway revue. Nothing says Grand Old Family Values like merrily sanctioning divisive stereotypes.

Coraline (2009)

***½/****
screenplay by Henry Selick, based on the book by Neil Gaiman
directed by Henry Selick

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Best known for The Nightmare Before Christmas (although a lot of people still think that was directed by Tim Burton), Henry Selick returns to the realm of creepy stop-motion animation with an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's slim volume Coraline. Despite the addition of a character and an ending altered for, one suspects, purposes of padding, the book's sense of creepiness and agile grasp of the long blues of the pre-pubescent girl alone in a house with inattentive parents remain pristine. The picture's message retains the British-nanny scold of "be thankful for what you have," though Dakota Fanning's vocalization of the title character leans in and out of a Northwest American youbetcha. It suggests that of the many demons Coraline fights, the most treacherous is the grey beast Populism--the one that demands Teri Hatcher voice Mother (and Other Mother) and Ian McShane upstairs Russian circus performer neighbour Bobinsky. But credit Selick for in essence attempting a Charlie Kaufman film for children with Jan Svankmajer imagery--his invention almost making one forget that it would've worked better in an older, more mysterious, more fraught place than rain-swept Oregon. It is, after all, a picture that illustrates the horror of perfect domesticity in favour of perfect dysfunction: here, the threats of Stepford Wifery far outweigh the threats of a dual-income family, house poor and scrabbling to get by. Viewed as a movie about class, the three levels of Coraline's pink house--the top rented to Bolinsky and his dancing mice, the bottom to Spink & Forcible (Jennifer Saunders/Dawn French)--can be seen as some social stratification of which Coraline's Mother does not suffer well.

Hannah Montana: The Complete First Season (2006-2007) + Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007) [Special Edition] - DVD

HANNAH MONTANA: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image C Sound C+ Extras D+
"Lilly, Do You Want to Know a Secret?," "Miley Get Your Gum," "She's a Super Sneak," "I Can't Make You Love Hannah If You Don't," "It's My Party and I'll Lie If I Want To," "Grandma Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Play Favorites," "It's a Mannequin's World," "Mascot Love," "Ooh, Ooh Itchy Woman," "O Say Can You... Remember These Words?," "Oops! I Meddled Again," "You're So Vain, You Probably Think This Zit is About You," "New Kid in School," "More Than a Zombie to Me," "Good Golly, Miss Dolly," "Torn Between Two Hannahs," "People Who Meet People," "Money for Nothing, Guilt for Free," "Debt it Be," "My Boyfriend's Jackson And There's Gonna Be Some Trouble," "We Are Family--Now Get Me a Water!," "Schooly Bully," "The Idol Side of Me," "Smells Like Teen Sellout," "Bad Moose Rising"

ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS
½*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras D+
starring Jason Lee, David Cross, Cameron Richardson, Jane Lynch
screenplay by Jon Vitti and Will McRobb & Chris Viscardi
directed by Tim Hill

by Ian Pugh Contemplating the factors that pushed Hannah Montana into the limelight is automatically more interesting than devoting the least amount of attention to the eponymous Disney sitcom that introduced her to her gullible constituency. The concept behind the show, a kind of rock star wish-fulfillment that teaches its tweener audience that if you tell enough people you're famous, you'll get there eventually, has proved the foundation on which to make a mint. But sit down to watch "Hannah Montana" itself and you won't see much more than the same episodic drivel from the Disney Channel--standardized junior-high antics cushioned by lame slapstick. Any significance you cull from a deeper reading invariably leads back to the construction of the carefully-groomed personality that serves as its centrepiece. Flanked by her best friends (Mitchel Musso and Emily Osment) and supported by her manager/father (Billy Ray Cyrus) and brother Jackson (Jason Earles), Miley Stewart (Miley Cyrus) divides her time between a typical teenage life and a tour through fame as bubblegum diva Hannah Montana. What she actually does with that time hardly matters.

Bolt (2008)

**½/****
screenplay by Dan Fogelman, Chris Williams
directed by Byron Howard, Chris Williams

by Walter Chaw What counts as a revolution for Disney animation nowadays is tellingly only a shadow of Pixar's gracefully loaded pictures. It demonstrates that any film completed under the supervision of John Lasseter can't be that bad, but also that all the things wrong with The Mouse over the last couple of decades won't clear up with just one picture. Bolt isn't a bad start, though, handling in its light, rote way a couple of nice moments with orphaned cat Mittens (voiced by Susie Essman) that remind of Jessie's heartache from Toy Story 2 and a few well-paced action sequences that recall a superhero highlight reel from The Incredibles (speaking of films that need a sequel). The point of greatest interest is that Bolt represents the second major movie this year after Tropic Thunder that has as its protagonist an actor who doesn't realize he's no longer on a soundstage. (Collective commentary on the end of our time in Oz or Kansas?) Even without a deeper interest in answering the questions that it asks (in sharp contrast to the introspective, almost silent WALL·E), it's still light years ahead of Disney's spate of racist, misanthropic entertainments and/or direct-to-video sequels that cynically transform their Vault™ into a McDonald's franchise.

Kung Fu Panda (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

½* Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
screenplay by Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger
directed by Mark Osborne & John Stevenson

VIEW IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Ian Pugh The generic mediocrity known as DreamWorks' animation department is about eight steps behind the multilayered brilliance of Pixar, and with Kung Fu Panda I think they finally reveal how sore they are about it. Their latest cinematic effort seems like a particularly barbed response to Brad Bird's The Incredibles and Ratatouille: we are told that the way to make something special is simply by believing that it's special. Which, as Bird taught us, means you can apply that label to everything and everyone until nothing and no one is really special. In considering something so blatantly knee-jerk contradictory to his valid points, you have to wonder where, exactly, the belief in an egalitarian society ends and a genuinely destructive jealousy begins. The entirety of Kung Fu Panda strokes the middlebrow ego: the comedy is painfully broad and predictable, while the action sequences are edited into a wild, incomprehensible mess (although I must admit, watching a limbless viper perform complicated martial arts techniques is unexpectedly lovely), and at its core, it's outright insulted by the apparently galling insinuation that talent has an impact on results in any field of endeavour. In an insane attempt to refute that, Kung Fu Panda concludes that it's still better to be fat and lazy than talented and educated.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008) + Role Models (2008)

MADAGASCAR: ESCAPE 2 AFRICA
½*/****
screenplay by Etan Cohen and Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath
directed by Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath

ROLE MODELS
***/****
starring Seann William Scott, Paul Rudd, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Elizabeth Banks
screenplay by Paul Rudd & David Wain & Ken Marino
directed by David Wain

by Walter Chaw Rote and routine, Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath's follow-up to their popular Madagascar takes the usual sequel route towards magnification with the obnoxious Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (henceforth Madagascar 2). At the heart of it is a weird, feral mix of Lord of the Flies and Swiss Family Robinson as a group of New Yorkers gets lost on safari--commentary, if you want to formulate one, on the incursion of Americans into the rest of the world. It's not a bad thing to try to impose on this film in this historic election year, particularly since you're not likely to be distracted by very much else in the picture. It's even interesting to wonder how it is that lion Alex, voiced by Jewish Ben Stiller, could have been sired by daddy Zuba (Bernie Mac) and a nameless mom (Sherri Shepherd)--shades of Simba (Matthew Broderick) somehow springing from the loins of Mufasa (James Earl Jones). What's most potentially interesting about the piece, however, is the interspecies miscegenation (is it "bestiality" if they're both animals? Sort of like is it still necrophilia if it's Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron?) suggested between giraffe Melman and hippo Gloria (voiced by isn't-he-Jewish David Schwimmer and black Jada Pinkett Smith, respectively), eventually equated ironically with the union of a penguin and a bobble-head hula doll.

The Polar Express (2004) [Two-Disc Widescreen Edition] - DVD|The Polar Express Presented in 3-D - Blu-ray Disc

**/****
DVD - Image A Sound A- Extras C
BD - Image A Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis & William Broyles Jr., based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Walter Chaw Robert Zemeckis's The Polar Express seems to be the culmination of a lot of his weird obsessions: his celebration of middle-class Aryan heroes; his tendency towards the tense and anxious; his love of casting an actor in multiple roles; Tom Hanks; Eddie Deezen; and that subtle quality of nightmare that infects even the most innocuous of his movies. (Zemeckis produces horror films in his spare time under the "Dark Castle" imprint; I wonder if he'll ever, What Lies Beneath notwithstanding, just cut the bushwah and make a straight shocker.) When Christopher Lloyd's Nazi-esque Judge Doom from Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit "dips" an adorable animated shoe into a corrosive sludge, Zemeckis foreshadows the engine that drives all of The Polar Express. It's infernal entertainment and comparisons to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will are unavoidable (particularly in a disturbing rally scene), but it's hard to know how much of that intense martial creepiness is intended as satire, and how much of it is just what lies beneath.

Journeymen: FFC Interviews Eric Brevig and Brendan Fraser|Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (2008)

Bridge to Terabithia (2007) [Widescreen]; The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (2007); The Spiderwick Chronicles [2-Disc Field Guide Edition] - DVDs

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Josh Hutcherson, Annasophia Robb, Robert Patrick, Zooey Deschanel
screenplay by Jeff Stockwell and David Paterson, based on the book by Katherine Paterson
directed by Gabor Csupo

THE SEEKER: THE DARK IS RISING
½*/**** N/A
starring Alexander Ludwig, Christopher Eccleston, Ian McShane, Frances Conroy
screenplay by John Hodge, based on the book by Susan Cooper
directed by David L. Cunningham

THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Freddie Highmore, Mary-Louise Parker, Nick Nolte, David Strathairn
screenplay by Karey Kirkpatrick and John Sayles, based on the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black
directed by Mark Waters

by Walter Chaw In the genre of wide-eyed, hyperactive 'tween bullshit, there seems a common thread of missing parents or siblings with all the attendant Oedipal complexities upon which to coat-hanger every genus of just-pubescent, Uncle Joe Campbell shenanigans. (Oh, I get it, it's a metaphor for strange hair, jerking-off, and embarrassing hard-ons--no wonder I identify with these things again as I get older.) More underground than overt adolescent emo rock-star/rapist fantasies like vampirism, the flicks of this type that work--such as Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, or the third and fifth Harry Potters, or The Passion of the Christ--incorporate the uncertainty and body horror of growing up with hero/martyr fantasies and, ultimately, the melancholy of childhood's end. The result of a job well done is a piece of enduring, often befuddling, resonance, owing in part to the canny hijacking of some existing folklore or mythology (including comic books) and the gratifying recognition that at the end of all that hormonal devastation is the justification of manhood. Psychosexual psychodrama at least, the new crop of boy-into-man-boy flicks, in the wake of the astounding success of that certain boy wizard (and, shit, probably Shrek's, too), takes a new interest in fantasy as a means to specific ontological ends. For this unabashed fan of Matthew Robbins's idyllic, laden Dragonslayer, it's not entirely bad news.

WALL·E (2008)

***½/****
screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon
directed by Andrew Stanton

by Walter Chaw What curbs Andrew Stanton's WALL·E from being a complete triumph is an extended Battle Royale in the middle of the film between a ship's captain and his HAL-like autopilot--more Mack Sennett than Stanley Kubrick, it's a moment that panders to the diaper set instead of, as the rest of the picture does, elevating animation ever-so-delicately into a medium in the United States instead of a genre. Here in this children's film, find a blasted post-apocalyptic wasteland--a ruined Manhattan with towers of trash stacked higher than its abandoned skyscrapers by a robot, WALL·E, left behind for seven hundred years while humanity waits in orbit for Earth to become inhabitable again. It's never clear what devastated the planet, though there are suggestions aplenty that it has something to do with unfettered consumerism and terminal neglect by its human stewards, as the film opens with an elegant, eloquent, wordless forty-minutes of WALL·E nursing a connection with his absent masters through endless viewings of the "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" sequence from Hello, Dolly!--the one that ends with a lovely moment of hands held in new love, which becomes the central image of longing in the piece. The song's refrain is haunting to me now--in a way that I never expected anything sung by Babs could be--similar to how the phrase "meet me in Montauk" has post-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If WALL·E had stayed on this uninhabitable Earth scoured by 250 mph windstorms, especially with our hero discovering a plant sprouting in an abandoned refrigerator, I don't know that I could bear the sadness of it.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008)

**½/****
starring Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell
screenplay by Andrew Adamson & Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, based on the novel by C.S. Lewis
directed by Andrew Adamson

by Walter Chaw Let's face it: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (hereafter Narnia 2) is by most objective measures a complete mess. It doesn't do a particularly good job of shading in its backstory (you really need to have read the book or seen the first film very recently) and its narrative proper is truncated and spastic. The characters don't demonstrate enough awe when they're confronted with a minotaur for the first time, nor do they register the appropriate shock upon characters from their storybooks suddenly appearing in their midst. Though there's a real problem with special-effects films that spend too much time gawping at their own illusions, it's not much better when pictures like this give its characters good reason to be surprised and they're not. It begins in the middle and ends with an exit tune so embarrassing that it threatens to completely deflate the goodwill the picture has, against all odds, built to that point--but damn it if it isn't quite good for all that. Narnia 2 reminds of Stardust in that sense: it works because it works, because the connective tissue that's there in the ephemera is made of sinew and spider silk--strong, fibrous, and sticky even when the actual plotting does the film no favours. Its themes are universal even though C.S. Lewis is unabashedly Christian; what's laudable about the first instalment and now this sequel is the obvious pains taken to present themes of resurrection, redemption, and faith as archetype rather than dogma. Attaching something so specific as an idea of Satan, for instance, to a brief, remarkably affecting reappearance of The White Witch (Tilda Swinton) is a reach and missing the point besides. Narnia 2 is about believing in something so simple as a greater power--about humility and resisting temptation and the easy path. Yoda had something to say to my generation from atop a log in Dagobah, and it's possible to see Narnia 2 as Luke's invitation to meet his darker self in the roots of a gnarled old tree.

Speed Racer (2008)

*/****
starring Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, John Goodman, Matthew Fox
written and directed by The Wachowski Brothers

by Walter Chaw This generation's Tron lands with unsurprisingly little fanfare early in the 2008 blockbuster sweepstakes, the victim of niche nostalgia and bottomless kitsch as well as the theory that total indulgence from all involved will prevent The Wachowski Brothers' Speed Racer from turning out to be their Spruce Goose. I've seen just enough "Speed Racer" cartoons to recognize when people like John Goodman are impersonating badly-drawn '60s television anime (as opposed to Goodman impersonating badly-drawn '60s Hanna-Barbera)--and just enough, too, to futilely hope against hope that there wouldn't be a chimp and a chubby tyke who stow away in a racecar's trunk now and again. But I haven't seen nearly enough of the TV series to want to see more of it, and after enduring the Cool World live-action version of "Speed Racer", I confess I've sort of lost the will to live. In other words, I was never a fan of the cartoon and was mainly interested in this trainwreck on the strength of Bound and The Matrix. Still, I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't take a moment to laud the brothers on their audacity--the very quality I appreciated in the two Matrix sequels, which were, by most analysis, disasters. It seems like sour grapes to knock the picture besides--or at least it seems futile, because the Wachowskis don't appear to care what people think of them along their road to wearing Kleenex boxes on their feet and saving their pee in mason jars. Speed Racer is exhibit one in the case that the Wachowskis aren't in it for praise (they're not going to get any credible praise here) or money (they're already loaded), but rather to luxuriate in the contents of their den's shelves: first Alan Moore comics with V for Vendetta, now this excruciatingly faithful reproduction of an inexplicable camp artifact. Perhaps we should count our blessings that they weren't huge fans of "Voltron."

Hiya, Kids!!: A '50s Saturday Morning - DVD

by Ian Pugh Take a gander at the stuff you used to watch as a kid and you'll more than likely come to two realizations: 1) that a lot of stupefying crap wormed its way into your living room; and 2) that the shows that were actually pretty good tended to throw out a lot of jokes that flew right over your preteen head. Dedicating each of its four discs to a different block of children's programming from some indeterminate period of the Golden Decade^*, Shout! Factory's Hiya, Kids!!: A '50s Saturday Morning DVD collection strongly suggests that this would prove true of every generation from the boomers on. Entire plotlines ripped from the pages of LIFE magazine, a bobbing camera briefly acting the part of the audience collectively nodding its head in agreement, "Hamlet" characterized as a comedy--watching television from fifty years ago is an interesting venture, though "interesting" may be as far as a greenhorn like me can go in examining this set. Although it appears to have deliberately avoided iconic moments from the shows in question in order to maintain the illusion of simply stumbling on them with a flip of the dial, Hiya, Kids!! is somewhat self-defeating as the re-creation of an experience. It's easy to get the gist of the show in question (the "dramas" are especially easy to pin down), but it's extremely difficult to form a substantial opinion about anything in this line-up. True that you often decide whether or not to dedicate yourself to a TV series on the basis of one episode, but with the sheer number of interactive concepts on display--most notably in all-inclusive "clubs"--you realize that the phenomenon that surrounded many of these programs contributed immeasurably to their purpose and appeal. Alas, without much context, the brilliant concept behind Hiya, Kids!! tends to feel a little arbitrary.

Cops: 20th Anniversary Edition (1988-2007) + Smurfs: Season One, Volume One (1981-1982) - DVDs

COPS: 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
"Cops: 20th Season," "Pilot," "Las Vegas Heat," "First Ten Seasons," "Second Ten Seasons"

THE SMURFS: SEASON ONE, VOLUME ONE
Image B+ Sound B- Extras D
"The Smurf's Apprentice/The Smurfette/Vanity Fare," "King Smurf/The Astrosmurf/Jokey's Medicine," "St. Smurf and the Dragon/Sorcerer Smurf," "The Smurfs and the Howlibird," "The Magical Meanie/Bewitched, Bothered and Besmurfed," "Smurf-Colored Glasses/Dreamy's Nightmare," "Fuzzle Trouble/Soup a la Smurf," "The Hundredth Smurf/Smurphony in 'C'"

by Ian Pugh Kevin Rubio's "COPS"-Star Wars mashup Troops is painfully predictable, but there's a little nugget of profundity in its twist on "COPS"' familiar narration: "Suspects are guilty, period--otherwise, they wouldn't be suspects, would they?" It's the most concise description and criticism of "COPS" one could muster, almost impossible to build on because it so handily defines the tacit agreement the show's producers have with its audience. I mentioned in my review of the parodic "Reno 911!" that Fox's long-running reality show is useless in any political debate about police conduct, and it is--but upon watching several hours' worth of the series in a new "20th Anniversary Edition" DVD set, I became more perturbed by how it attempts to forge an uncrossable distance between you and the suspect. "COPS" always poses itself as something completely external to the viewer: in the interests of entertainment, the vast, vast majority of scenarios involve idiots caught in the act or resisting arrest. You're therefore not only a rubbernecker looking for a visceral thrill--you also come to consider yourself exempt from police scrutiny because you don't break the law and certainly wouldn't do so as blatantly and stupidly as these criminals. It's the equivalent of the moron who has no problem with the government wiretapping his phone because he doesn't believe he does anything to warrant their attention.

The Rookie (2002) - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

***/****
DVD - Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
BD - Image B- Sound A Extras B-
starring Dennis Quaid, Rachel Griffiths, Jay Hernandez, Brian Cox
screenplay by Mike Rich
directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw Based, at least in part, on the book The Oldest Rookie: Big League Dreams from a Small Town Guy by Jim Morris and Joel Engel, Disney's The Rookie is a semi-fictionalized account of the unlikely rise of small-town high-school science teacher and baseball coach Jim Morris from respectable obscurity to big-league relief pitcher. Morris (Dennis Quaid) inspires his team of bad news bears (Big Lake, Texas Owls) to overachieve by promising to try out for the majors if they get on a winning streak and make it to state tournament.

Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! (2008)

***/****
screenplay by Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul, based on the book by Dr. Seuss
directed by Jimmy Hayward & Steve Martino

by Walter Chaw Surprised as anyone to be saying it, but Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! is actually pretty good. It's a climate-change kind of flick, as you might imagine, or at least that's the prism du jour through which one must view a world afflicted by weird weather patterns on the brink of complete annihilation. Likewise, when the residents of microbial Whoville are enlisted to participate in their own salvation (despite a feckless, flat-earther ruling party urging them to fiddle while Rome melts), it points a rather stern, Seussian finger at the fringe holdouts who still feel that evolution and global warming are theories in dispute. (I personally like the argument that because things are getting colder, it proves that global warming isn't happening--which is, let's face it, almost as ignorant as the idea that someone buried dinosaur bones to fool us into thinking there was a world before Man.) Not so much in dispute is this idea that films--especially genre films like this--are often the first indicators in popular culture of the things that infect us, that make us worried for ourselves and for our children. Heartening to find entertainment directed at kids that applies the cautionary warning of "The Emperor's New Clothes" to our heritage of instantly Oprah-fying atrocity--and that provides a CGI context for Dr. Seuss's sometimes-terrifyingly surreal imagery to spend no time gawping at its own invention.

Nancy Drew (2007) - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Emma Roberts, Josh Flitter, Max Thieriot, Tate Donovan
screenplay by Andrew Fleming and Tiffany Paulsen
directed by Andrew Fleming

by Walter Chaw Andrew Fleming's Nancy Drew isn't just bad, it's fascinatingly bad. From minute one, it's an example of what happens when nobody knows what the hell is going on and doesn't have the wit to hide it. It suffers from the same malady as Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End in that it's only confusing if you walk into it believing there's something to figure out--but unlike that picture, this one has so little in the way of internal coherence that it's almost a work of surrealism. When teen sleuth Nancy (a fetching yet robotic Emma Roberts) awakens to find herself abducted in an old projection booth, she doesn't panic and search for exits, she stands up, collects her compass (why does anyone need a compass in the middle of Los Angeles? Dunno), and heads straight for a little window that she promptly opens onto a scaffolding, thus enabling her snickersnack escape. It mirrors an earlier scene in which Nancy discovers a letter pivotal to the picture's central mystery stuck in an old book that, as executed, has all the weight and import of every other indecipherable, non-linear, dada scene in the piece. I'm not suggesting, even, that there's no tension in the film, as there's tension galore in trying to follow, much less predict, its astonishing leaps of baffling, shit-headed incongruity. There are no impulses that make sense, no characters with either a toehold in our reality or a justification for their existence (and the only people who might give a damn about Nancy Drew as an institution are too old to see the film on their own and unlikely to take their baffled children, anyway). As a mystery, in the most literal sense, it's possibly the most mysterious film of the year.

Justice League: The New Frontier (2008) [Two Disc Special Edition] + The Adventures of Aquaman: The Complete Collection (1967-1970) - DVDs|Justice League: The New Frontier - Blu-ray Disc

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER
*½/****
DVD - Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
BD - Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
written by Stan Berkowitz with additional material by Darwyn Cooke, based on the graphic novel DC: The New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke
directed by David Bullock

THE ADVENTURES OF AQUAMAN: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION
Image C- Sound C Extras D+
"Menace of the Black Manta/The Rampaging Reptile Men," "The Return of Nepto/The Fiery Invaders," "Sea Raiders/War of the Water Worlds," "The Volcanic Monster/The Crimson Monster from the Pink Pool," "The Ice Dragon/The Deadly Drillers," "Vassa, Queen of the Mermen/The Microscopic Monsters," "The Onslaugh of the Octomen/Treacherous is the Torpedoman," "The Satanic Saturnians/The Brain, the Brave and the Bold," "Where Lurks the Fisherman!/Mephisto's Marine Marauders," "Trio of Terror/The Torp, the Magneto and the Claw," "Goliaths of the Deep-Sea Gorge/The Sinister Sea Scamp," "The Devil Fish/The Sea Scavengers," "In Captain Cuda's Clutches/The Mirror-Man from Planet Imago," "The Sea Sorcerer/The Sea-Snares of Captain Sly," "The Undersea Trojan Horse/The Vicious Villainy of Vassa," "Programmed for Destruction/The War of the Quatix and the Bimphars," "The Stickmen of Stygia/Three Wishes to Trouble," "The Silver Sphere/To Catch a Fisherman"

by Ian Pugh Utterly incomprehensible thanks to a deadly combination of rigid adherence to its source material and a discernible lack of vision, the DC Animated Universe's latest stab at the direct-to-video market can only be described as a complete embarrassment for everyone involved. Adapting a graphic novel by Darwyn Cooke that isn't that great to begin with (it's basically a portable art gallery of Fifties-era superheroes, too long by half and tied together by a belaboured treatise on why the decade wasn't all it's cracked up to be), Justice League: The New Frontier doesn't attempt to build on the kernel of an idea therein. Instead, apparently weighing time constraints against the most exploitable elements, it pays lip service to the plot and reduces everything else to a series of biff!pow! pin-ups. I've been a steadfast defender of comic books for years now, but sometimes I wonder if artists and fans really know what has to be done to make them viable as an adult medium. Their long-suffering quest for legitimacy has seen a pronounced downturn since the introspective melancholy of Superman Returns suffered wholesale rejection for not featuring enough people punching each other in the face--and it appears that Bruce Timm and his crew won't be the ones to try to change minds. There's an awful moment in their last animated opus, Superman: Doomsday, in which the Man of Steel laments that he has saved the world a hundred times over but still hasn't cured cancer--shortly before the film pounds its audience with nearly a full hour of mind-numbing violence. The New Frontier contains a similar moment, except that it replaces social issues with political analogies so simplistic and heavy-handed they would make Emilio Estevez cringe. When Lois Lane (Kyra Sedgwick) says, circa 1954, that "whatever party, whatever administration, there'll always be bogeymen like [Joe McCarthy]" in summarizing that "we need a leader"--and then stares directly at the viewer--it's difficult not to see this entire enterprise as just a bunch of kids playing dress-up.

The Wiz (1978) [30th Anniversary Edition] - DVD

*/**** Image B Sound B+ (DTS) B- (DD) Extras C-
starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Richard Pryor
screenplay by Joel Schumacher
directed by Sidney Lumet

by Alex Jackson The Wizard of Oz is a quintessentially American work that could not possibly have been produced by any other culture. Doing a "blaxploitation" version of the story, then, seems considerably less tacky than doing one of Dracula or Frankenstein. Dorothy is a farm girl from Kansas living with extended family in something beyond the traditional nuclear-family structure. There's a strong sense of community in the film as well: in addition to Auntie Em, Uncle Henry, and the hired hands, Professor Marvel, the inspiration for the Wizard of Oz, is there at Dorothy's bedside when she wakes up. Dealing with themes of solidarity among the working class, The Wizard of Oz isn't a film about the black experience, but with just a little tinkering, it easily could be.